For the first time since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the public will be allowed to visit Naval Base San Diego in large numbers to tour warships. Tours have been held elsewhere in San Diego Bay, but for security reasons they were banned at the base, which today is growing so fast that some ships get double-parked.

And more ships are on the way.

The Navy estimates that the base will have 78 ships in 2020, up from 58 today. The boom reflects a decision by the Obama administration to position more ships on the West Coast to enable the Navy to more quickly deal with real and perceived threats in the Pacific.

Earlier this week, tugs pushed the amphibious warship to a pier at the north end of Naval Base San Diego for the public tour phase of Fleet Week. Gary Robbins

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Earlier this week, tugs pushed the amphibious warship to a pier at the north end of Naval Base San Diego for the public tour phase of Fleet Week.

The boom also represents a transition in technology. The Navy is retiring its old frigates and replacing them with the first littoral combat ships (LCS), which are designed to perform a greater variety of missions at higher speed in shallow coastal waters. San Diego also may get the first two Zumwalt-class destroyers, which at 600 feet are the largest ever built for the Navy. They’re nearly 100 longer than the well-known Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. And San Diego will be home to the America, an 844-foot amphibious assault ship that will have the most powerful air wing yet placed on a warship of its type.

The growth and change is causing strain for the 90-year-old base because it’s going to have to accommodate many ships that are longer and broader than existing vessels, and feature a deeper draft. An $80 million pier is now under construction to help ease the strain.

Shortly after the base opened in 1922, the Navy mothballed nearly 80 destroyers there because they were no longer needed, due to the end of World War I. The base maintained a reserve fleet until 1975, and at one point it reached 223 ships, including numerous aircraft carriers. San Diego Union

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Shortly after the base opened in 1922, the Navy mothballed nearly 80 destroyers there because they were no longer needed, due to the end of World War I. The base maintained a reserve fleet until 1975, and at one point it reached 223 ships, including numerous aircraft carriers.

“We’ve been told to prepare for growth, and we’re going to manage it,” said Capt. Winton Smith, commander of a base that gets 34,000 military, civilian and government visitors on an average day.

Smith is trying to cultivate community support as he moves forward. Last Christmas, as part of an experiment, he allowed the public on the 1,108-acre base to see the holiday lights that had been draped from the rigging of ships.

“We got 667 cars in just two hours, from various communities,” Smith said. “It proved that we could have large numbers of people in a controlled environment, and bring the Navy and the public together. I think there’s a starvation for that kind of contact.”

The San Diego-based destroyer Milius fires on a target in Iraq in March 2003. US Navy

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The San Diego-based destroyer Milius fires on a target in Iraq in March 2003.

Smith thought that if the Christmas event went well he’d propose opening the base for the Sea Festival — or ship tour — portion of Fleet Week. The decision became even easier when he read the scores of positive comments that people made about the Christmas event on a Facebook page.

Smith went to Fleet Week organizers and proposed opening the highly secure base for ship tours for two days, which will occur this weekend. The public can tour the new amphibious warship San Diego, the cruiser Princeton, the destroyer Wayne E. Meyer, and the Coast Guard cutter Morgenthau. The base expects 5,000 people a day to visit the ships between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.

The festival will be confined to the northern end of the base. But from there, visitors can see much of a facility that rose from marsh land and tidal flats on the eastern side of San Diego Bay just after World War I. At the time, city officials wanted a broader presence by the Navy, which had started training pilots at North Island. This led the city to deed 98 acres of bay front property to the U.S. government, and in February 1922, acting Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt Jr. designated the land a destroyer base.

For the first time since 9/11, the public will be allowed on Naval Station San Diego to tour warships. The base also has plans to expand and is building at least one new pier. The guided missile destroyer William P Lawrence, left, sits next to the amphibious ship USS Peleliu at Naval Station San Diego.— John Gastaldo

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For the first time since 9/11, the public will be allowed on Naval Station San Diego to tour warships. The base also has plans to expand and is building at least one new pier. The guided missile destroyer William P Lawrence, left, sits next to the amphibious ship USS Peleliu at Naval Station San Diego.
— John Gastaldo

The title sounded lofty. It wasn’t. The Navy turned much of the base into a ship graveyard, using the area to mothball destroyers the United States had built for World War I. The base quickly became jammed with “four stackers,” the name given to the short-range anti-torpedo destroyers widely built before and after the war. They were so poorly designed that many were scrapped, and the episode helped persuade the Navy to invest in battleships.

The base also was designated as a repair facility. But for years, it was little more than a backwater.

“The station was pretty much a mud hole,” retired sailor George Cameron told the San Diego Union in 1972, when the base turned 50. He’d served there at the beginning, when “the land was being dredged up and the Marines were living in tents. There was no servicemen’s club on the base and very little entertainment in town. We made our own.” He was referring to the liquor that sailors made with a still.

For the first time since 9/11, the public will be allowed on Naval Station San Diego to tour warships. The base also has plans to expand and is building at least one new pier.— John Gastaldo

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For the first time since 9/11, the public will be allowed on Naval Station San Diego to tour warships. The base also has plans to expand and is building at least one new pier.
— John Gastaldo

The base grew some during the 1930s. But it didn’t undergo major expansion until World War II, when it became one of the prime repair bases for American ships fighting in the Pacific. Repair shops seemed to rise overnight. Roads were built or expanded. Cranes were trucked in. Workers flooded through the gate at 32nd Street, going on to achieve an extraordinary feat. Between 1943-45, they repaired 5,117 vessels.

Throughout the war years, the base also continued to have a large fleet of reserve, or mothballed, ships. At one point, the inventory got up to 223 vessels. The ships served as a tourist attraction during harbor cruises, even though they were rotting away.

“The Navy started to reduce the size of the reserve fleet because the ships were so old,” Coronado naval historian Bruce Linder says. “A lot of the reserve ships were sold for scrap or sent to other anchorages maintained by the Navy. This accelerated in the 1960s; the piers were needed for the modern Navy ships. All the reserve ships were gone by the mid-’70s, and this was in full swing as a naval base.”

The Navy invested in the base in the 1970s, making it a major player during the Cold War and, later on, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But almost half of its 11 piers are vintage World War II, and they lack the design and amenities of Naval Station Norfolk, in Virginia. All of the piers at Norfolk are the same size and have two decks, which makes it easier to store supplies and equipment. San Diego’s piers differ in size, and some strain to handle the cranes used to load larger ships.

But a lot is being invested in San Diego. The Navy says the first 12 littoral combat ships will be based here, which would add to the region’s workforce. The beam of LCS Freedom is almost 57 feet wide, or 12 feet wider than the frigates that are being weeded out of the Navy.

“The Navy now thinks of ships as platforms; it wants to know how many different things can you do on them,” said Eric Wertheim, a historian and defense analyst with the Naval Institute. “It’s not like in the old days when you had small destroyers with very limited capabilities. Today’s ships are very powerful; you need fewer of them.”

The amphibious warship America, for example, is bigger than some World War II-era carriers, and it will have a lot more firepower, carrying the F-35B Lightning II jet, helicopter gunships and the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.

Smith is hustling to anticipate the needs for such vessels. He has teams inspecting the condition of every pier, and assessing what kind of improvements he’ll seek at a time when the design budget is likely to shrink.

“This base,” said Smith, “will have to change to accommodate the newer ships.”